Simple Recipes (15 page)

“Why not?”

“Because it’s plain. You miss them all the time.”

I let this sit for a moment, then I broke into a smile. Will was unfailingly patient. He let me dance around a topic but never
come to rest on it. He forgave all my inabilities, first and foremost my unwillingness to speak with him about my family.

At first, this allowed me to put all my energy into the here and now, our present life. In hindsight, I see it also freed
me to walk away, at least for a period of time, from certain obligations. I asked myself, does my family have any hold on
me? For a long time, I tried to say no. We would remain separate from each other until the end. But then Will and I married,
and when I thought about my own future, the possibility of children, I saw how the tables had turned.
Yes,
I realized. Their hold
would never diminish. For the first time I was struck by the disarray of my life. Walking away had not saved me as I had hoped
it would.

My father used to own a furniture store.

That is a sentence I might have said to Will, but I can’t recall now exactly which details I gave him.

My father used to own a furniture store and the store was named Bargain Mart. The front was made entirely of glass. A big
white awning sheltered the entrance. I still remember that, when I was a child, my grade-one teacher singled me out. “Oh,
yes,” she said. “It’s your father who owns that store, isn’t it? The furniture store on Hastings Street.”

I nodded proudly. Even to me, at that age, the idea of ownership meant something. Along Hastings Street was the bakery, the
deli, the children’s clothing store, the light shop. My father’s furniture store was one among these and it had its place
in the accepted order of things.

On weekends, I assisted my father. I turned over the
Closed
sign. Together, we sprayed Windex on the front windows. The couches were used, or sold on consignment, so you could find
an armchair for ten or fifteen dollars, a sofa for thirty. When my father made a sale, he let me deliver the receipt and change
to the customer, which I did proudly.

I was six years old then, and I dreamed commercials. In my mind, my father was the owner of an exciting retail outlet. Soon
the furniture store would be a household word:
Bargain Mart.
Parents would announce to their children that this weekend’s excursion would be to
Bargain Mart,
and children across the city would look up from their Cream of Wheat and cheer. From where we lived in Burnaby, in the spill
of houses beneath the mountain, to Maple Ridge and Vancouver, people would flock to my father’s store, carting away sofas
on their shoulders, tables in their arms. My father standing at the front, hands on his hips, young.

My parents were thirty when they emigrated from Indonesia. The first business they owned in Vancouver was a restaurant, the
All Day Grill. My father cooked up steak and eggs, sweet and sour pork on rice, and beef dip sandwiches.

I was born shortly after they arrived in Canada. When I was five months old, the doctors diagnosed me with kidney failure.
This is what my mother told me — after twelve hours of cooking at the restaurant, my father would drive to the hospital. He
would sweep into the nursery and gather me in his arms, careful of all my intravenous tubes. We paced the hallway, my father
rolling the IV pole ahead of us. My mother says I recognized him. In his arms, I was peaceful, but
when he returned me to my bed, I wailed and fought. The nurses complained that each time my father left, I threw tantrums
then shredded my cotton blanket with my tiny hands. I lost a kidney, but came out of the hospital when I was one. The restaurant
went under.

Perhaps because of this, my father would often say that I had ruined his life. This was never said in a malicious manner,
or one meant to wound me. It was matter-of-fact, the way one might speak of a change in the weather or an accident far away.
If something was troubling him, my father would give a slow shake of his head. “Ever since you were born, Miriam, my life
has been terrible,” The smallest hint of a smile.

When I tell people this, laughing, they shake their heads in disbelief. I suppose I can understand how these words might sound
to a stranger. Insensitive. Cruel. But this is not so. Between my father and me there was always a tacit understanding. Despite
the teasing, he had an unwavering faith in me. “My daughter, Miriam,” he said to everyone. “When she grows up, she is going
to buy her parents a big house.”

I would hold on to his hand when he said this, my face glowing with pride.

Of course my father never expected such things from me. It was only a joke, a laughing aside to tell me that his faith in
me was abundant. Still, in the years after I left home, I wanted it to be true. I wanted to present my father with a house,
hand him the key
to his perfect life. By that time, he was living alone. The years had taken their toll on my family and he was estranged from
my mother and me.

I needed to ask him,
Have I disappointed you?
but the question itself seemed too simple. What kind of answer could he give? We had failed each other in so many unintended
ways and then we had drifted apart. My father seemed lost in the past and I did not trust myself to guide him into the present.
So I kept my distance and thought from time to time how things might have turned out differently. If I had been the kind of
daughter I never was, faithful and capable, who could hold a family together through all its small tragedies.

Bargain Mart, with its hall of couches, is now a restaurant. The floor-to-ceiling glass nicely curtained. Ethiopian, my mother
thinks, or is it Japanese? Some mornings I wake up remembering the store, not how it looked inside but how it looked when
you stood at the front, at the glass, the view of the street and the stores across. It is not the kind of place you can find
so easily now, a neighborhood furniture store, family-owned.

As a child, I faked illness in order to be taken there. Once, I tiptoed into the bathroom and held the
blow-dryer up to my face. Then I stood at my parents’ bedside. Two hands pressed to my stomach, I whispered, ’Ache.” A pause.
Then,
“Ache.”
My mother eyed me suspiciously. But my father, somehow, believed me. He held the palm of his hand to my forehead and his
face filled with worry.

While I lounged in bed, my father brought me Eggo waffles, a glass of milk, and one tablet of Aspirin crushed soft as sand.
Then he called my grade-one teacher to tell her I was sick again. Instead of school, he would take me with him to the furniture
store.

Together, we walked across the front lawn, the cold grass crunching like snow under our shoes. I held both hands over my stomach
and watched my breath unroll ahead of me, a white windsock. My father scraped
ice
off the windshield in scratchy lines, he leaned his body far across the car, arms out like a swimmer. After he was done,
we sat in silence, watching the ice melt in little triangles off the windshield. When the car was warm enough, my father said,
“Okay,” and I replied, “Okay.” We rolled forward on the grass. He turned down the alley, exhaust lifting like a plume behind
us. The car lumbered down Hastings Street, past the bakery and the deli and the light shop.

In front of the store, we stood shivering on the sidewalk while my father fit the key into the lock.
When the door jingled open, the lemony smell ofcleanser wafted out. My father mopped the floors every night before closing
and the scent stayed trapped inside until morning. In the store, all the couches seemed to call to me — the creaky recliner,
the velvet loveseat. I ran ahead of him into the maze of sofas.

Along one wall there was a closet storage room. It had no door and my father had hung a shower curtain there instead. On my
sick days, I slept inside the closet. My bed was a plastic lawn chair. When customers began to arrive, my father pulled the
shower curtain closed so that I could sleep.

“Dad,” I said once, unable to see around the corner to where he was sitting. “What are you doing right now?”

“Right now? I’m trying to imagine what other people see when they come into the store.”

“How come?”

He paused thoughtfully. “I’m the salesman. I must understand the buying patterns. Then I can find some way to convince them
that they need this couch or that chair.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s like an argument.”

“A bit like one. Only there’s no fighting. Just persuasion. That’s the beauty of my job. The best salesmen do that, they convince
you to see their point of view.”

There was a radio he kept on his desk at the
back, and he sang along to John Denver, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” his voice filled with gusto, “You look a little like
him,” my father joked, “With those ears on you.”

I climbed out of the lawn chain Walking in my bare feet, I took my father by the hand, pointing out the pieces I liked. “Don’t
sell this one while I’m at school,” I told him. “Or this one. I put my name on it.” He looked at the scrawl in blue crayon
on the upholstery:
Miriam.
No anger. Too tired, maybe, like the time I begged him to let me mow the lawn and I promptly ran over the electrical cord,
severing it in two. No anger there, either.

In the closet, I could always get a feel for the way things were going in the store. Rarely was business brisk. My father
was not the type to push anyone into a purchase. “Big commitment to buy a couch,” he said to one person. “It’s important to
be sure.”

To someone else, he said, “This piece here? Oh, yes. See the way it reclines. Very smoothly. Just like new. Yes, a very good
price.”

On the other side of the shower curtain, a pair of shoes stopped and waited. A low whistle. The man talked about inflation,
the way a dollar just didn’t go as far as it used to.

“Yes,” my father replied, his voice filled with sympathy. “That is very true.”

The shower curtain opened suddenly and I was blinded by light, “Jesus Christ.” the man said, stepping backwards, his hand
dropping the curtain.

My father hurried forward. “My daughter, she is resting.”

The man stared at me, aghast. I smiled helpfully.

“No problem, no problem.” My father nodded at me and yanked the shower curtain closed.

“I’m very sorry. I didn’t realize,” his voice trailed off.

“No problem,” my father said again, boisterously. “She is resting only.”

Their feet disappeared from sight, the door jingling soon after.

That afternoon, I watched my father read the newspaper, cover to cover, retaining names and news for his casual conversation.
“Trudeau,” he said to one customer, then shrugged his shoulders, or “Bill Bennett,” or “Thatcherism,” the word hanging disturbingly
in the air.

Outside, rain poured down in thin streams off the white awning, splashing the sidewalk. There was a lull and my father reached
into his desk and pulled out a handful of photographs. I had seen them before, Indonesian plantations spread out under wide
skies. He tapped his index finger down, pointing out the house where my parents lived before coming to Vancouver. Stilts like
legs holding it off the ground. My father ran his hands over the trees in the backdrop,
told me about the fruit, strange and exotic things, rambutan and durians. From memory, he sketched a map of Irian jaya — the
shape like a half-torso, one arm waving — where my parents had lived for a short time, “Do you miss it?” I asked him,

“What’s to miss?” he said, smiling gently.

I didn’t know.

“I only miss the fruit,” he said, putting the photos away. “The country, I’ve almost forgotten.”

My father and I played tic-tac-toe until six o’clock, and then my father closed the store. While he counted the cash, I washed
the floor, dragging the mop behind me as I paced back and forth. Eventually, my father took the mop from me and scrubbed diligently
at the scuff marks and water stains. Then he turned the lights down and locked the door behind us. We drove home in the Buick,
past the Knight and Day Restaurant that had burned down three times in the last two years. My father pointed through the windshield.
“See that restaurant?” he said. “That restaurant’s burning down
night and day.”
He laughed almost hysterically.

At home, my father washed the vegetables for dinner. I set the table so that everything was ready by the time my mother came
home at seven, exhausted from her job at the tire store.

Over dinner, my parents inquired after each other’s day. My mother spooned some liver onto my
plate, wondering aloud why I might be sick. “Did you eat something bad?” she asked.

“Here,” my father said, lifting his chopsticks towards me. “Eat more vegetables.”

Afterwards, as he was clearing the dishes, they worried over the day’s receipts. Only two small sales. “January is like this,”
my father said. “It’s to be expected.”

“December was like this too,” my mother replied.

“It will pick up.”

My mother sighed. “It will have to.”

She and I lay down on the couch to watch television. She fell asleep almost instantly, her face buried in my neck.

That night, I slept between them. They stayed on far sides ofthe bed, me in the middle drifting from one side to another in
all their empty space. In the morning, my mother woke first. I could see her in the dark, reaching for her clothes. When I
waved goodbye, she hovered above me, planting a kiss on my forehead. Then she kissed my father. By the time he opened his
eyes, she was already dressed and gone.